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qazsedcft writes "In a move the company is billing as its first foray into the hardware business, Oracle Corp. said Wednesday it will begin selling server computers that come with its database software pre-installed."

What about all those insurance companies that decided to become investment banks, like AIG? That worked out pretty well, right?

Seriously though, this could work for people that like to hand over the keys to one company and wipe their hands of the whole mess (a non-trivial number of companies), but any company that likes to handle most of its own IT is probably not going to go for it unless Oracle has come up with a way to optimize the hardware for the Oracle DB that no one else has.

Could be that you have a limited view of what their core business is. Is it selling databases? Or, could it be selling database services?

For a given number of dollars, what is the optimum hardware to run a database? How much memory of what type vs how much/many hard disks? Which OS? Which drivers?

Selling the hardware will let them present an entire solution that is optimized for the one thing that they want to do...serve data as quickly as possible. The customer is presented with an appliance that will offer the maximum database performance for a given dollar point. Well, at least as optimized as anything can be with an Oracle Database stamp on it.

Maybe not so good for the customers, though. This seems almost like the mainframe world where peripherals and upgrades often cost more than they should. I envision more than one support contract being voided by adding 'non-approved' hardware to one of these machines.

This might be a response to the fact that Microsoft recently purchased a company that sells integrated hardware/software for databases/data warehousing supporting massively parallel processing, named Datallegro [datallegro.com]. They are currently integrating it with SQL Server 2008. Somewhat exciting, in my opinion!